Live and Online: First Round of New School Web Sites

Once the new Des Moines Public Schools web site went online last December, focus quickly shifted to upgrading the 60+ school web sites throughout the district.

The goal of this effort has been to find the right balance between creating web sites that have a consistent layout and functions for every school in the district while doing a better job of featuring those things that are unique to each school.

“Every school in Des Moines has its own unique identity, and we hope to do more to highlight and celebrate that with these new web sites,” said Phil Roeder, director for community relations. “At the same time, we want to make sure parents and other guests to our web sites can expect to easily find the information they are looking for when visiting us online.”

For the past several weeks, the district’s community relations staff has been working with the four International Baccalaureate elementary schools as the first batch of schools to implement the new school web sites. These four “test pilot” schools are now live and online at:

Some features of the new school web sites include:

  • Each new site will also have a new address that is simpler, shorter, and easier to remember, using the formula of schoolname.dmschools.org.
  • The new design is cleaner, simpler and better organized, allowing each school to more prominently feature news, events and announcements on their home page.
  • The new web sites allow each school to have their own look with school colors, mascots and photos – in addition to controlling the content of pages and how their menus are organized – while at the same time the structure of each site is the same so that online visitors from one school to the next can expect that certain things will be available.
  • Each new site includes a Classrooms section, set up so that teachers can tell a little bit about themselves, their classes, and include links to online resources they may be using in conjunction with their class.
  • The new sites are built using the same content management system, meaning that training and support will be easier.
  • The new school web sites are also better connected with the rest of the school district; on every new school web site is a common header and footer to connect people with other schools, district offices, or the district’s social media sites.

Work is already underway on the next round of school web sites. It is currently expected that 4-5 new school web sites will be completed each month.

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